This year’s enormous Alice Neel show at the Met deserved its acclaim. But it included such a wealth of Neel’s mature portraits — humane figures often surrounded by blue lines — that it was hard not to see her earlier work as a transitional phase.
The canvases in “Alice Neel: The Early Years,” at David Zwirner, curated by Ginny Neel, the artist’s daughter-in-law, with Bellatrix Hubert, are a remedy. Spanning more than three decades (1927-1959), they are arranged, very loosely, in order of size and weight as well as chronology, as if to guide viewers toward a transcendent encounter with the artist’s grown sons. Captured, with Neel’s singular magic, sitting regally, “Richard” (1959) and “Hartley” (1957) are pulsing, slippery and alive, at once present and opaque.
Until you get to them, though, the show’s emphasis is on the strange and grimy landscapes, dreamscapes and caricatures of Neel’s 1930s and ’40s. Though her fabulous eye for emotional detail is already there — notice the impatient bohemian raising his eyebrows in “Village Party” (1933) — in many ways she’s still learning to paint. A receding street in “Under the Brooklyn Bridge” (1932), for example, looks more like a hill of clay, and many of the compositions are distinctly awkward. But that very awkwardness and idiosyncrasy, given its own space, is also a robust way of depicting an intense and mysterious world. Look at those red and yellow buildings under the Brooklyn Bridge, crammed edge to edge and crushed over the street: You’ll hear the clatter of trains overhead and feel the energy of a chaotic metropolis. Consider the obtrusive green fence behind her Village party: You’ll feel hemmed in and claustrophobic, too.